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Untitled Document
ARCHIVING - THE JEWEL IN YOUR CROWN
From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 5 No 06 - September 2005
MANY ORGANISATIONS MAY BE STORING UP HUGE
PROBLEMS FOR THEMSELVES BY FAILING TO ARCHIVE DATA, WHILE OTHERS RELY ON MANUAL
PROCESSES TO CARRY OUT THE TASK. BRIAN WALL HAS BEEN SPEAKING TO THOSE IN THE
KNOW TO FIND OUT WHAT THEY THINK OF THIS DUBIOUS APPROACH.
‘BACKUP' AND 'ARCHIVING' ARE NOT ONE AND THE SAME
That is the first key point that BridgeHead Software CEO Tony Cotterill is
at great pains to point out.
It may seem surprising he should find it necessary to make this statement to an
audience whose awareness of storage imperatives and strategic thinking is
generally regarded as very high. Yet there appears to be evidence that there are
indeed failings in this area that need to be addressed with some urgency.
"One of the biggest challenges faced is dispelling a fundamental myth about
storage management - that backup equals archive," says Cotterill. "Backup is
simply a copy of data held somewhere else. The devilish detail that is essential
to archiving is that an archive must be searchable in order to recover
appropriate data quickly and easily. Indexing is key to this process and, with
today's data volumes, must be automated."
Recent research suggests that many IT directors are not familiar with the
difference between backup and archive. According to the findings, 28% do not
archive data*. Of those that do, 67% use manual processes - which is a
monumental task, given today's data volumes.
"These figures suggest questionable archiving techniques are used," adds
Cotterill. "The extent to which archiving is failing, or left undone, is
underlined by the fact that fifteen per cent of respondents don't know how long
it would take them to retrieve a lost file, with two per cent admitting that
they wouldn't ever be able to find it - indicating major blurring of the line
between backup and archiving.”
This interpretation, he stresses, is reinforced by the revelation that business
continuity and disaster recovery head the list of drivers for archiving, at 48%.
"It's time to make genuine archiving a priority and it's simple to make the
business plan. On top of existing regulations, sooner or later US-style
compliance legislation will impose the requirement on companies to produce
specific files or documents on demand and within a timescale. Backup does not
enable this, making archiving a mandatory business objective."
And then, of course, there is the budget. The same research shows that the
average organisation with more than 1TB of data on its expensive primary storage
could, with effective archiving, reduce the volume of data by at least 32%.
"Now, that's a tidy saving for a tidying exercise. It should even pay for the
backup solution, too," Cotterill concludes.
ARCHIVING AND SURVIVING
Dave Gingell, VP marketing EMC Software, EMC, is equally perturbed by some
of the approaches that organisations are taking towards archiving. "End-user
productivity is a major business driver for the explosive growth in file system
data," he says.
According to Gingell, "many employees are accustomed to managing their
messages, present- ations and spreadsheets according to their organisations'
imposed storage quotas.Consequently, data files on personal and local file
systems are less likely to be backed up.
“Organisations have also attempted to solve the data growth problem by simply
deleting older files to make room for new ones, which reduces productivity by
forcing users to manually copy their files to alternative locations. These
actions also create concerns around regulatory compliance and long-term data
retention."
As file system data is created and stored on file servers, file systems must be
enlarged and more disc space provisioned and allocated. Yet, in many
organisations, file system data is kept on relatively high-cost disk storage. As
such, organisations face higher acquisition costs for the additional physical
storage, as well as increased management and overhead costs.
Then, adds Gingell, there's backup. When kept on primary storage, historical
files are generally included in full backups, along with the more recent files -
even though they have not changed and have been backed up many times before.
"This increases the overall backup time and cost, the length of recovery times
and the risk of recovery failures," he says. "Today, a smarter archiving
strategy is based on a policy-based file system within a tiered storage
infrastructure. Policies can be established to move files between storage tiers
over the lifetime of the data. Customers can precisely target files better
suited to reside on different storage tiers, as well as manage data to match
service levels.
“Organisations can also effectively manage data movement, access requirements,
storage costs and capacity needs, while allowing data movement in a manner that
is transparent to end users.
"As a result, file systems are effectively relieved from the growing burden of
inactive data files consuming high-performance disk resources, thereby reducing
storage costs and improving backup and recovery speeds, while maintaining
end-user productivity and compliance at the same time."
THE COMPLIANCE FACTOR
Since the collapse of Worldcom and Enron, of course, organisations have been
faced with an increasing number of compliance regulations, such as the Data
Protection Act (DPA), the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Sarbanes Oxley and
HIPPA.
And given how pervasive email has become, doesn't it now have to be a central
part of any compliance strategy? That is the question posed by
Alasdair Kilgour, managing director of CommVault UK and Ireland, but not without
a twist in the tail: "However, is compliance just about archiving?" he asks.
"Well, it could cost a lot of money to think in that way."
As Kilgour rightly points out, when an email compliance request is raised, it
requires all of the information relating to the subject or individual concerned
to be provided.
"Some of this may be in a compliance archive, some may be in a backup
environment and some will be in a high-availability production environment.
“If several software solutions - even if they are all supplied by one vendor
- are managing each of these environments, then it requires a co-ordinated
effort from different administrators to extract the data from each of the
disparate environments, because different skills are needed to manage each
environment."
The complexity of this approach results in extra time and effort being
expended - therefore it costs more to fulfil. Combine that with the fact that
many compliance requests legally require the data to be provided in a relatively
short timescale - or the company may well face a stiff financial penalty - and
the risk this approach introduces could be very costly.
"That is why organisations need to look for vendors - such as CommVault -
that can assist organisations to meet the increased demands of the corporate
compliancy by taking a unified approach to data management,” says Kilgour.
"A unified approach to data management means that all the software tools used
to manage the data are built on a common code.
This means that, to fulfil a compliance request, one administrator can use a
common search window that will search across all aspects of the data environment
- the archive, the backup and the high-availability production environment -
reducing complexity, time, cost [administration and hardware] and risk in one
fell swoop."
Kilgour's argument is that it's worth looking at more than just archiving for
compliancy. "Archiving is one part of the process and, if the archiving tool is
disconnected from the rest of the data management toolset, it will have
significant downsides - and it will mainly be extra cost."
THE ESSENTIALS
Ensuring the long-term preservation of an organisation's enterprise data
throughout their data lifecycle has become something of an industry mantra of
late - and there are a wealth of solutions that are targeted at meeting that
need. According to Atempo, its Time Navigator Archive solution can provide users
with centralised and structured archiving, so data remains on line while storage
costs are kept to a minimum.
"Time Navigator Archive allows you to keep only live data in business
applications, and store all reference data in a dedicated and well managed
company repository," claims Atempo. "And it can be closely integrated with your
business applications to store reference data."
Meanwhile, the Atempo Mailbox Manager solution delivers policy-based
archiving of business-critical information held within Microsoft Exchange.
Atempo Mailbox Manager enables companies to manage storage growth in their email
environments - a major challenge for most businesses these days and becoming
ever more so - while reducing associated storage and management costs.
"Atempo Mailbox
Manager archiving and indexing simplifies the process of search and discovery,"
the company adds. "When you need the archived email message for personal,
business or regulatory inquiry, Atempo Mailbox Manager can deliver the email
messages for viewing or restoration in the most efficient and automated manner,
minimising disruption to the business." ST
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